+ ~ -
 
Please report pronunciation problems here. Select and sample other voices. Options Pause Play
 
Report an Error
Go!
 
Go!
 
TOC
 

and a pencil, underlined a good many
passages in which the injustice and fearfulness
of these circumstances were
demonstrated, and prayed him if he would not
show these also to His Majesty. This he
did, and the king answered: 'If this is
so, the man is right.' And so I returned
to Greifswald without a hair of my head
being touched. Several years later, however,
the same king abolished this state of
things."

In 1804, German affairs began to interest
Arndt more and more, and he issued at
that time the first part of that work, since
become so famous, Geist der Zeit (Spirit of
the Time). As a boy, he had been brought
up to be enthusiastic for Sweden, and from
his earliest years he was a monarchist.
Notwithstanding, however, that his heart
was very Swedish, every victory of the
French over the Germans cut him to the
soul. But it was only slowly that the feeling
of how German his sympathies were
awoke in him. Not even in the darkest
days, when Napoleon had trodden down all
Germany under his relentless iron heel, did
Arndt despair of its ultimate resurrection
its better future and greatness. It was in
this mood he published his Geist der Zeit,
which determined his whole future career.
In it he comforted sorrowing Germany, and
tried to animate it with hope. After the
battle of Jena, he left Trantow, where he
had been working, for such a French hater
as he could no longer feel himself safe there.
And when, in 1809, the house of Wasa fell,
and the French general, Bernadotte, was
called to the throne, Arndt would no
longer stay in Stockholm. He went to
Berlin, and lived there, as a master of
languages, under the name of Allmann. In
1812 he went to Russia, which at that
time was the centre of all the excitement
for Germany and German life. He went
there by invitation of the Freiherr von
Stein, who had been driven into banishment
by Napoleon, and who knew Arndt
only from his writings.

It was a curious sign of the times that
the men of freedom had to seek their asylum
in Russia!

Here Stein, Arndt, and several officers,
worked for the institution of a German
legion; in short, Russia, in the winter of
1812, was the hearth on which the
enthusiasm for German freedom was fanned.
Once more Arndt swept his lyre, and heart-
stirring songs, powerfully exciting broadsides,
were the result. After Napoleon's
retreat from Moscow, a new life seemed to
animate Prussia. Every one was carried
away by the tide of popular enthusiasm;
men tore themselves from wife and child,
students left their colleges, schoolboys
scarcely capable of bearing arms exchanged
the pen for the sword. All was animation,
excitement.

Arndt, then forty-three years old,
rejoiced, and exclaimed, "What the song has
sung has become reality;" and it was then
he wrote his ever-memorable poem, Was
ist des Deutschen Vaterland? In April,
1813, Arndt followed Stein to Dresden,
and here, in the house of Appellations-
Rath Körner—father of Arndt's great rival
in patriotic song, the youthful author of
Leier und Schwerdt (Lyre and Sword)—he
met Goethe. Goethe had come to Dresden
en route for his yearly expedition to Carlsbad
and Toplitz. He spoke hopelessly of
German affairs, and once, when old Körner
was speaking of his son, pointing to his
sword that hung on the wall, he said, "Oh,
good people, you may shake your chains,
you cannot break them; the man is too
great for you."

After the battle of Leipzig appeared
Arndt's pamphlet Der Rhein, Deutschland's
Strom aber nicht Deutschland's Grenze
(the Rhine, Germany's Stream, but not
Germany's Boundary). In 1818, he
published the fourth part of his Geist der Zeit,
which gave umbrage at court, and in 1820
he was suspended from his position as
professor of modern history at Bonn, whither
he had been called in 1818. He was
subjected to an examination for high
treason, which lasted until the summer of
1822; he was, however, acquitted, but
compelled to retire into private life. The
following years he wrote more than ever,
and his love for his Vaterland remained
unshaken.

It was happily destined to be rewarded,
for the first great act of justice worthy of a
king, performed by Frederick William the
Fourth after his accession, was formally to
reinstate Arndt in the professorate.

"At last," he tells us in his autobiography,
"came the year 1840, when King
Frederick William the Fourth reinstated
me. Twenty years I had lain still, like old
iron, and rusted. I was over seventy, too
old for a fresh living mouth. In the age
when all the wisest descend the chair of
instruction, I was to ascend it to speak. I
hesitated and hesitated, in the feeling that
my trumpet was blasted long ago, that it
was an os magna sonans no longer, that I
could be merely a sounding name for the